


rollerworld will have to wait

by ottermo



Category: On My Block (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Lots of Death Mention, death mention, this is pretty dark I guess but only because Jamal doesn’t have all the facts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 00:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18304373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: Jamal arrives at the quince, after the shooting.





	rollerworld will have to wait

**Author's Note:**

> listen I don’t know where Jamal was going but let’s pretend he paid attention to the ambulance parade and put two and two together. 
> 
> I have a lot of feelings about Jamal’s treatment by the group and this only scratches the surface, mainly I needed Monse to get a hug. The longer I stay writing in this fandom the more you’ll see that hugs are the main thing I’m putting down.

 

In the heat of the moment, because there are ambulances and flashing lights and shit is clearly going down, Jamal’s presence of mind deserts him and he dismounts, leaves his bike and the bag leaning against the fence outside Ruby’s house. Later, he’ll hardly believe he just left the money, sitting there, zip not even fastened fully over the stash. For now, he’s in a daze, listening to the frantic voices of the people spilling out of the house.

His eyes rove the crowd for Ruby, Cesar, Monse or Olivia. Eventually he sees a shape that must be Monse, and he heads toward her, listening out for snippets of information as the partygoers pass him. There has been a shooting, that much is obvious. And “he” is in a bad way. Whoever “he” is. Immediately Jamal’s thoughts turn to Cesar, and his chest tightens in dread.

“Monse,” he says, when he reaches her. “Where’s Cesar? Did they get him?”

Monse is shaking visibly; she looks young in a way Jamal hasn’t seen since middle school, maybe even before that. Last night, at the theatre, she’d been so mad at him. Heck, he’d been mad at her, he’s still mad - but not with this Monse, not here, not now. Not when she looks so bereft. Everything from yesterday, all that rage and disappointment on both sides, that can’t matter for now. He sets it outside of himself.

“Not Cesar,” she says. Jamal doesn’t have time to be relieved before she adds, “Ruby. And Olivia.”

Jamal curses, can’t find other words to ask for the details. Two women, aunts of Ruby’s, stumble out of the house and Jamal instinctively pulls Monse out of their path, doesn’t take his arm away once they’re clear. She reaches up to put a hand over his, then takes it properly, holding on tighter than tight. Any other time, Jamal would be concerned for the use of his fingers.

“Is Ruby… I mean, are they…”

“They took them to the hospital. The bullet went straight through Ruby and into Olivia.” Monse’s voice strains to reach the words, and the end of her sentence is mostly gasps of air. “I don’t know if… it looked bad, Jamal. It looked really bad.”

She drops his hand and collapses instead against his chest, sobbing, terrified. Jamal is at a loss. It’s all so unreal, a horrifying whiplash after the elation of just a few minutes ago. What’s the point of being rich if Ruby’s dead?

Because one of them is. One of them’s dead. At first Jamal doesn’t know how he knows it; it’s just a deep, unsettling intuition. Rotting there at his core, a surety, despite Monse’s more vague description of the scene. Then, he realises: the ambulances. Two passed him. Only one with lights. It hadn’t seemed relevant before he knew the names and number of victims, but now it’s the worst thing he’s ever known: they don’t leave the lights on if there’s nobody to save.

Suddenly he wants to throw up. He swallows, forces himself to stay grounded, partly because he can’t think how he can possibly tell Monse what he knows, especially when he doesn’t have the most pertinent detail. It’s not like she’ll know who was in the ambulance that happened to pull out second.

Jamal holds Monse tight and doesn’t think about Ruby being dead, or Olivia being dead, or both of them being dead. Who’s to say the other set of lights stayed on after he turned the corner? He doesn’t think about never seeing Ruby again, about how the last time they spoke it was during a fight, and Ruby’d walked away from him shaking his head, like Jamal was a waste of time, as much of a fraud as Chivo’s puzzle had turned out to be. He doesn’t think of Olivia’s smile, her kindness, her ease with all of them which had let Jamal believe he wouldn’t always have to be an outsider. He doesn’t wonder which one of them is gone. Which of them he’ll never see again.

By the time Jamal realises he’s crying too it barely seems to matter - he and Monse are fused together now, and since he’s not thinking about Ruby or Olivia he can think instead how bizarre it is, that last night Monse told him she hoped she’d never see him again and now here they are, holding each other upright, as if they’re all each other has.

Which leads him to another question.

“Monse,” he says eventually, “Was Cesar here? Was he the target?”

He feels her nod into his shoulder, loosens his arms so she can pull back and face him. She gives her eyes a perfunctory wipe with the back of her hand, but it doesn’t seem to achieve anything.

“He’s gone,” she says. “He was right next to me when it happened. We were – dancing. When I heard the shot I thought maybe… but he was fine, it was only them, and then we got separated when the emergency services arrived and I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

“He didn’t go after the shooter?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t see how he could have. Latrelle was gone before we even saw who was hit, and Cesar doesn’t have a car here.”

“Wait, Latrelle did this?” Jamal’s head goes into full spin again. “Then Cesar’s….”

“Yeah, he’s the target,” Monse finishes. “He must have been.”

“Then if he has any sense, he’s gone somewhere to hide,” says Jamal.

The two of them spend a long moment looking at each other, thinking about Cesar and the amount of sense he has.

“Shit,” says Jamal. He reaches for his phone, remembers it’s not in his jacket. It’s by his bike, in the bag with the money. Right, the money. He should go back for it. Soon. Everything outside of Ruby and Olivia - and now Cesar too - is so hazy. Like he’s caught between two different dimensions, the one where he’s the sole heir to the Rollerworld fortune and the one where three of his friends are potentially dead. The idea that either can be real is preposterous. The fact that both are precludes all rational thought.

Monse watches his hand pull away from his pocket, interprets at least some of his intentions. “I’ve called him like eight times,” she says. “It just goes to voicemail.”

Jamal steps back from her, both his fists clenched now, despairing. “So what do we do?”

“What can we do?”

“You think he’s gone to see Oscar? For backup?”

“Maybe.”

“Then…”

Jamal doesn’t need her to tell him it’s stupid for either of them to try and reach the Santos tonight. At best they’ll be caught in the crossfire and never get to Cesar. At worst, well. Jamal is dealing with enough worst-case scenarios tonight, without imagining more.

“I just can’t believe this happened,” Monse says quietly, after a while. “I mean, Freeridge is Freeridge, I get it. But it’s her birthday.”

Jamal reaches for her again. She nestles under his arm like he’s a windbreak, her only chance against the storm. Again, it’s ironic. This, from the girl who practically spat in his face when they last met. Jamal feels it fading in him now, kind of thinks it shouldn’t, knows he deserves more, but he’s unable to keep a firm enough hold of it, even under the surface. If this… if things are ever okay again after tonight, it’ll be in a distant-enough future that Jamal won’t remember it in the same depth.

He knows because it’s not the first time he’s set something aside until the ache has grown dim. Not the first time he’s handed out temporary forgiveness in a time of crisis, only to cancel the debt in peacetime. He has learnt that he doesn’t mean enough to them to be picky.

But hey, those are the breaks, just facts he lives with. Nothing to do with what happened tonight. What’s still happening, somewhere. Or so he hopes. He hopes there’s a hospital room where someone’s still fighting for breath. He hopes there aren’t two bodies being wheeled into the morgue. He hopes the ambulance lights were faulty. Hopes it like a fire burning.

But it’s a dark night and it’s only a tiny flame. It’s hard to see by.

“I’m gonna take you home,” he tells Monse, and miraculously she doesn’t argue. Slowly, they make their way down the Martinez driveway, and Jamal tries not to think about the times he’s walked this exact path, how it’s remarkable he hasn’t worn impressions of his feet into the ground over so many years of calling at Ruby’s, alone or with the others, simpler times that felt so fraught with the day’s anxieties. He doesn’t want to remember being seven, skinning his knee on the sidewalk and limping tearfully to Ruby’s door, doesn’t want to remember being eight and marching up to try out a new prank, getting turned away by Mario but hearing Ruby’s running footsteps behind him. He doesn’t want to remember being nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old and walking behind Monse and Cesar, aware somehow that the two of them were already on a separate plane but not bothered by it, so long as Ruby was walking beside him.

They reach the bike, and Jamal bends to pick up his bag. He’s so numb that he’s not even glad to find it heavy. Wordlessly, he closes the zip, and Monse doesn’t bat an eyelid. Good. Now isn’t the time.

They walk to Monse’s house mostly in silence, and Jamal takes her all the way to the porch.

“Is your dad at home?” he asks. Much as he wants the comfort of his own house right now, he’ll stay ’til dawn if it means she’s not alone. Being the cherished only child of a seemingly unbreakable home leaves you with a certain amount of guilt when it comes to parental availability.

“He’s home,” Monse says. She indicates a light that’s gleaming through from one of the back rooms.

“Okay.”

Jamal looks at her, takes in her exhaustion, her shock, her edge-of-sanity desperation. “Try and get some sleep,” he says.

Usually that would earn him a sarcastic reference to ‘Doctor Turner’, but tonight she just looks sad. “You, too.”

He turns to go, swings back when she says, “Jamal…”

And for a second he swears he can hear it on the wind; an apology, some kind of recognition that he isn’t who she called him yesterday. That she’s grateful he was there tonight. Something like that.

“Goodnight,” she says.

Alright, then. Never mind.

“Night, Monse.”

He turns his back to leave, the way he’ll never do in metaphor alone, no matter how many times he gets left. As he makes his way down the drive, the weight of the money becomes real again, becomes the force that drives him onward. It’s wrong. Someone died tonight, he reminds himself, someone you love. Very possibly someone you’ve loved since before you knew the word.

It’s a strange, strange night to be walking home alone. Jamal gets on his bike and pedals with the wind, left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. That’s the only duality he knows now. The rest will have to wait ’til morning.

 


End file.
